BELLE FOURCHE—For the fourth year in a row, the community showed up hungry and ready to support the Lady Broncs Golf Team at their annual Spaghetti Dinner fundraiser on April 10 at the Belle Fourche Country Club.
In addition to spaghetti, meat sauce and bread sticks, the event boasts a dessert auction, both silent and live! “Actually, we had a Spaghetti Feed fundraiser for her (Kelly Milliken) daughter, Chloe one year—she was on the golf team and she was having some medical issues, so we decided to help out, and that’s kind of how we got this going,” explained Damon Lange, Golf Coach. “And then we put the Dessert Auction with it and it just took off! I mean, the Spaghetti Feeds is good, but this—the Dessert Auction is really good!”
The event draws desserts from a variety of sources. This year there were 58 delicious delights to choose from, including everything from chocolate dipped fruit, strawberry cheesecake bars, lemon poppyseed scones and chocolate silk pie to name just a few. “All the girls from the team donate something if they can, and then I reached out to a lot of community members that I’ve known through other volunteer things, and it just kind of took off from there,” explained Kelly Milliken, event coordinator. “And now it’s become kind of a little competition between some of the local bakers as to who can have the top selling items! Some of them are from actual bakeries and businesses in town and others are just friends of friends.”
And boy oh boy did the community show up to help out the Lady Broncs Golf Team. The auctioneer for the night was Justin Tupper. The highest selling dessert of the night was German chocolate cake donated by Sherry Kokesh. After a wild round of bids, the dessert sold for $240. A peanut butter cheesecake by Shelley LeFebre brought $230 and two desserts tied at $190, they were a six inch white cake with raspberry filling by SME Treats and strawberry Jello poke cake by Elsie Adams.
The official booster club for the Lady Broncs Golf Team is Tee to Green. They run the fundraiser and collect all of the money for the night and then put it to good use taking care of the golfers. “We have paid for shirts and every year when the girls go to Black Hills Conference and Regions, we get each of them a sleeve of golf balls, so they’ve got fresh golf balls to play with,” shared Milliken. “We’ve done some meals at State when the girls go to State, we’ve done State shirts, so that way they all kind of have their special state golf shirts. We bought them all range finders to help the girls determine how far it is from their ball to the hole.”
Recently Tee to Green partnered with a grant from the West River Foundation, and put in a golf simulator at the high school. This allows the girls to practice inside. “Spring golf is really hard because you never know if it’s going to be 20 below or if it’s going to be 70 degrees outside,” said Milliken.
Coach Lange, in his fifth year as head coach, said there were seven girls on the Belle Fourche High School golf team this year. They had their first meet on Monday, April 13. The season runs through June. “The State Tournament is the first Monday and Tuesday of June, and it’s in North Sioux City, South Dakota,” explained Lange. “It is a short, quick season, we play two meets a week—most weeks until we get to State—very fast and furious!”
Coach Lange shared, “we’ve got a really good team of people—Kelly is definitely a rock star for us, and Jamie (her husband) has been my assistant coach for the last four or five years, and just a good group of parents. We are very, very fortunate to have what we have here!”
Milliken added, “we’re just extremely grateful to all of our community members for continuing to support us—between the people coming out tonight and buying the desserts to the people that bake them and volunteer their time.”
Read the full issue of the Belle Fourche Beacon by clicking here.
